One experienced school administrator shares two common misconceptions about teaching and learning that he once thought were the gold standards, then reflects on how adaptive leaders must continuously learn themselves, shifting their practices when and where it is necessary to provide the best education for students.

Big events lead to big changes. The COVID-19 pandemic and the shutdown of normal life have been devastating--in lives lost; long-term health effects; unemployment; and copious doses of anxiety and mental health problems, to name a few after-effects. Despite the challenges, however--or perhaps because of them--the author believes there will be…

Students with anxiety are prone to giving up a difficult work assignment before they even start it. So how can teachers help these students develop skills to successfully start and finish assignments and succeed in school? Behavioral analyst Jessica Minahan offers some practical solutions that teachers can implement in the classroom to motivate…

To engage all learners, schools must offer career-pathway courses that combine academics and deeper learning. Gene Bottoms, until recently head of the Southern Regional Education Board, describes a transformation he believes must happen in US high schools--adopting curriculums that include intellectual rigor in career and technical education (CTE)…

Most teachers try to avoid having students experience uncertainty in their schoolwork. But if we want to prepare students to tackle complex problems (and the uncertainty that accompanies such problems), we must give them learning experiences that involve feeling unsure and sometimes even confused. Beghetto presents five strategies that help…

"The only important thing about feedback is what students do with it," declares Dylan Wiliam in this article. The standard school procedure (in which a teacher looks at a piece of student work and writes something on it, and the student later looks at what the teacher has written) does not necessarily increase student learning. Teachers…

Imposing a penalty for late or incomplete homework assignments, Dueck says, neither inspires learning nor provides accurate grades. Dueck lists four rules that a teacher must follow if penalties for inadequate homework are to be efficient in prodding students to do that work. The usual homework penalty structures violate each of these four rules.…

A program to improve student ability to perform intellectually demanding tasks might reasonably focus on four types of objectives: abilities, methods, knowledge, and attitudes. (Author/MLF)

The effective ways of representing knowledge given the students and its use by teachers in departing the meaningful tasks are emphasized. An approach embodying five key principles like understanding big ideas, allotting tough assignments, thinking at high levels, problem solving and decision making ability are discussed.

To shorten the line at his desk, a fourth-grade teacher tries to build thought and work habits that will inspire his students to strive for excellence and achieve it in every assignment. Each lesson incorporates an experience, criteria for excellence, student practice, a rubric, examples, self-evaluations, peer and teacher evaluations, revision,…